The Best Women's Travel Writing (26 page)

ANENA HANSEN

Death and Love in Kenya

Kenya would teach her to cope—whether she liked it or not.

T
he morning James died, I was on my way to visit a neighbor.

December is Kenya's summertime, hot and dry, dust from the baked plains rising in lazy clouds and settling onto sweaty skin. My home, a little concrete bungalow, sits on the edge of a dingy Nairobi bedroom community stretching its gangly legs in the African version of urban sprawl—tin slum houses creeping beyond the town limits, tin slum bars springing up in small, social clusters. Across the highway, the town gives way to savannah, the long plain clouded with dust from cement factories, the scrubby grass green during the bi-annual rainy seasons, crisply brown the rest of the year.

“Carry your phone,” urged my sixteen-year-old foster daughter.

“I don't want to carry my phone,” I said. “I'm relaxing, I don't want to be disturbed.”

“But someone important might call!” she said. Scandalized that I would consider violating social etiquette by being unavailable to speak with someone who wished to speak with me.

I was not a hundred yards down the road when the phone rang. “I heard a rumor,” my colleague said. I stood in the concrete-brick street, staring at the bougainvillea climbing up the fence, its blossoms too bright, the day too beautiful, for the news that a friend had been killed.

That December was my second in Kenya. The previous year, just as my marriage was freefalling into crisis, I had come alone to Africa for what was meant to be a brief stint of volunteering. Daily I walked a circuitous route through the dusty town to perform my Do-Gooder White Girl duties, visiting low-income women living with HIV/AIDS. There was Violet, huddled in a tin house at the end of an alley running with wastewater, too weak to walk or speak; her seven-year-old daughter Elizabeth, coughing wetly with TB, would climb in my lap to sing. Hellen, wrapped in flimsy khangas, begged me to find an orphanage for her children so they would at least be fed. Adhiambo lay in a hospital bed pointing from her baby to me: “Samuel, you mama,
you
,” she declared, but to my relief she rallied, returning to her dirt-floored shack to continue raising her baby herself.

During those first months, Kenya kicked my ass. Its sheer, unstoppable poverty—the withered women extending pleading hands; the copper-haired children weak with malnutrition; the glue kids staggering past with an open bottle to their lips, breathing in the fumes that made the misery go away. I was crushed by the knowledge that nothing I could do would fix it. And I was constantly embarrassed by being so other, my white skin guaranteeing that my Kenyan experience would occur from a distance, viewed through a lens of plenty, of pity, of knowing
this will never happen to me
. I imagined the Kenyans despising me for it.

Nonetheless I felt, for the first time, that I was doing what I was meant to do. And so, when my husband and I decided to split up, I stayed.

One year later, I was living in a small, comfy bungalow in a quiet estate outside Nairobi. I had wanted to live “among the people,” but while I was comfortable using a squat toilet, carrying my water home in a jerrican, and sweeping my concrete-floored house with a small bundle of twigs, it's not called “Nai-robbery” for nothing, and security was one thing I was unwilling to go without. So I and my laptop, iPod, camera, and phone had taken up residence in a new housing estate, sheltered by chain-link fences cloaked in purple bougainvillea with guards standing bored but vigilant at the gate. I had, of necessity, traded full-time volunteering for a good job in advertising. Daily I cloaked my otherness beneath my adaptability, slowly learning Swahili, shaking hands with everyone when I entered a room, always carrying my own toilet tissue. I was falling in love with Africa. I was making it.

Then James died. And I saw a deeper layer of life in the developing world, one where the suffering
could
happen to me.

My neighbor, a rotund woman with a Kenyan good nature, found me bawling under her avocado tree. “Sorry, sorry,” she soothed. It's what Kenyans say when something bad happens to you—if you so much as stub your toe, a stranger on the sidewalk will cluck an earnest “Sorry!” In a land of so much suffering, sympathy is abundant.

“My friend died,” I sobbed, anxious to justify my maudlin American tears. “He was shot.”

“The one with dreadlocks?” Mary asked. I shook my head, ashamed to feel relief.

In fact, James had been my first Kenyan friend. The day I'd arrived, petrified, for my supposedly brief African experience, James had singled me out from the other volunteers; as we were shuttled to our homestays, he dared me to drive the van, knowing it was the wrong side of the road for me. I called his bluff and drove a tentative half-kilometer. He cheered, and we were friends. Over the next year I came to know him as a deeply kind-hearted man, devoted to his wife and daughter, passionate about helping his fellow Kenyans. His was one of those “why him?” deaths. There is never a why, of course, death just is, but I was fresh from several crushing losses and didn't know how not to go there. He shouldn't have died, because his death hurts
me
. Grief is a selfish emotion, in the end.

The one with dreadlocks, on the other hand, was my boyfriend Austin. My first boyfriend since the divorce, since promising myself I would never be vulnerable to a man again. Dating had been easy to swear off in Kenya, where the single men (not to mention many non-single ones) were fond of pickup lines like “So where can I find a white wife?” But Austin was special, a courteous, compassionate man, devoted to his work as a soccer coach for children in the slums. The dreadlocks, which he'd grown after ending his career with the Kenya national soccer team, hung halfway down his back, giving him a tough appearance (dreadlocks were often associated with Kenya's ruthless political gang, the Mungiki) that belied his extraordinarily gentle nature.

I've never been able to resist gentleness.

Each phone call I made that morning confirmed James' death, and each Kenyan, much closer to James than I was, comforted me. “Sorry, sorry,” they soothed, genuinely distressed at my pain, as if their own was not infinitely greater. Had I been braver, I would have called James's wife to offer my condolences. I knew a bit about grief; in the preceding three years I had lost my mother and my two-year-old niece to cancer. But my bereavements, while crushing, had not affected my survival. Grace's sudden widowhood, on the other hand, rendered her an unemployed woman in an impoverished, jobless land, with no way to support herself or her child—and I, who could lay down the plastic and be sipping a grande macchiato in my hometown Starbucks twenty hours later if Kenya got too tough for me, was ashamed to claim any common ground with her catastrophe.

I'd planned a party at my house that afternoon for the HIV women and their families. The death of a friend entitled me to cancel, but I would have been compelled to join the crowd of mourners filling Grace's home, and I was too chicken. And too socially unacceptable—while Grace's status as new widow gave her carte blanche to weep, I had no such excuse and would have embarrassed myself and everyone else with my inappropriate sniveling. So the party was on.

Violet came, dressed in her best purple dress, strong enough now to walk short distances. Hellen, resting in my small yard, watched her daughters skipping rope and managed a weary smile. An hours-long Monopoly game took place between an HIV-positive white friend who blew Kenyans' minds (you mean you can get it too?) and the children, too poor to go to school, too smart to be daunted by the complex Western game; they acquired fictional property with heartbreaking glee.

As a little girl, I had occasionally visited wealthy friends whose splendid homes amazed me; I was both warmed and astonished to realize my simple concrete bungalow must be the same to these children, its flush toilets, five rooms, and all-you-can-eat snacks a veritable wonderland. Looking through their eyes, I tried to count my blessings, to stop my infernal weeping and remember how fortunate I was. As a Kenyan hostess should, I chatted and entertained my guests, I stuffed them with chapati and lentils and rice—and every so often, as the afternoon passed, I remembered with a sick shock that James was still dead.

Finally I told Austin. He had invested himself for years in the lives of kids who grew up and got shot by police, or were executed by the Mungiki, or drank the mind-altering illegal brew called changa'a and set themselves on fire. He knew what sudden, senseless loss was like.

“Anish, what is wrong?” he asked as I dissolved in tears again.

“James was shot last night,” I blubbed. “He died.”

“Ah,” he sighed. “Sorry, sorry.”

Tearfully, I recounted James' death. Austin listened in silence, nodding, then urged me, “Be strong.”

Be strong? My ex-husband had never asked me to be strong. He probably
still
had stains on his shirts from how often I'd bawled in his arms. But Kenyans are accustomed to disaster; they can't afford, or won't permit, the luxury of acting tragic over something so common as a young father shot dead by thieves at the gate of his home. “Don't cry, Mama,” my foster daughters exhorted, and I heard their disapproval—orphans since girlhood, they knew a thing or two about suffering themselves. Still, I was irritated; as an American, I firmly believed in my God-given right to express my emotions. But as a Kenyan, I was expected to suck it up. I wasn't sure I could. My ache for James, for the pointlessness of his death and the suffering of his wife and child, felt like the first bruise of a beating that would break me if I stayed.

I thought of Grace again that night, after I finally saw my guests off, waving them home on the matatu minibus with relief. The house quiet at last, I rested with Austin, studying his face by lamplight—the long scar above his eyebrow, the dreadlocks framing his jaw, the silky black skin of his cheeks where I stroked my thumb. I had been so determined not to fall in love again. Yet there we lay, on a thin foam mattress on my white-tiled floor, cuddled in a posture only love takes. I had loved my husband, but I left him; Grace loved hers, and she stayed. Yet for her this was the first of a lifetime of nights without her husband, and for me it was another night in my lover's arms. Grief is selfish, and so is love—that I, who had love once and walked away, was taking more.

I thought, after the death of my mother, my niece, even during the self-inflicted severance from my husband, that losing someone I loved so much would destroy me. But an African will tell you: everything is lost in the end. Love is no guarantee, not for the man to whom I whisper
ni yangu
, “mine,” not for the two delightful, trying teenagers who call me Mama, not for the dying children skipping rope in my front yard with deceptive vigor while their weakening mothers watch and smile. You can love someone and lose them in an instant, or across the path of years. But you will lose them in the end.

In Africa, you must grow like the acacia tree, twisted by the wind but continuing to stretch for the sky. Life is harsh, but it is beautiful; so you care for your loved ones when they suffer, you say “sorry, sorry,” and together you go on.

Anena Hansen still lives in Kenya, still gets her ass kicked by deep poverty, and still plans to stay because now it's home. With a helplessly American perspective, she blogs about her Kenyan experiences on her website,
www.anenahansen.com
. In addition to freelancing for local and international publications, she balances a power-suit day job in advertising with running a soccer program for high-risk teenage girls in the slums. Austin, naturally, is the football team's coach. They're engaged to be married, and she is stoked.

LAURA FRASER

Dance of the Spider Women

A traveler to Italy is bitten by a mysterious, ancient rhythm.

T
he road that runs down through Salento, a region in the heel of Italy's boot, is almost completely deserted at night. I am driving to a folk concert with two Italian friends, and we pass only a few sleepy villages, many gnarled olive trees, and scarcely another car along the way. When we reach the town of Alessano, situated a few kilometers from the point where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet at the tip of the peninsula, we park on a narrow cobblestone street. No one is out, and the air is dry and hot. The place seems scrubbed bare of inhabitants. We trudge up a hill, round a corner, and then—a blaze of light. Before us, the central piazza is packed with thousands of people. The crowd stretches from the town's ornate neo-Gothic church to the clock tower, everyone staring up at the brightly lit stage.

Singer Enza Pagliara, the evening's main act, is just warming up. Fernando Bevilacqua, a local photographer who has brought my friend Giovanna and me here, elbows his way to the front of the crowd, sidling past elderly
signoras
in cardigans and pumps, scruffy kids with dreadlocks, men with slick black hair and neat red pants, and young women in diaphanous skirts and eggplant-tinted curls. The crowd is
di tutti i colori
, as they say in Italian, all types and all colors. Giovanna, who is short, climbs the step of a fountain to get a better view.

A few strums of guitar, several staccato taps on a tambourine, some mournful cello sawing, and Pagliara steps up to the microphone, reaching wide with her long arms as if to embrace the entire crowd. The sound that emerges from her mouth isn't like blues or jazz or opera or anything else I've ever heard. It's an Arab-tinged wail of close harmonies and dissonance, full of longing, lust, and lament. Her clear voice carries over the thousands of upturned faces, and the song seems as ancient as the limestone buildings of Alessano.

Maybe it is. When I tell Bevilacqua I can't understand a word, even though I speak Italian, he explains the lyrics are in Salentino and Griko, dialects spoken here that date back to the Greeks who colonized the area long before the Romans arrived. Pagliara sings hymns to endurance, plaintive tunes for gathering wheat under a beating sun; come-hither courtship dialogues with back-and-forth verses between voice and instruments; and pieces with polyphonic overtones that sound like Balkan ballads. Pagliara invites her elderly aunts and uncle on stage to sing a few traditional lullabies and other songs from their childhoods. The crowd is swaying, entranced by the mystical music, which is called
pizzica
.

Then a frenetic song starts up, and Bevilacqua whispers that this is a
pizzica pizzica,
which translates to “bitten bitten.” The tambourine, accordion, and cello pick up speed, and Pagliara sings faster and faster. The words are coming so quickly now, they're just sounds. Pagliara is dancing so fast that her long black hair swishes wildly and her feet barely touch the stage. The earth vibrates with thousands of feet pounding the cobblestones in the square. Bevilacqua glances at me and says, “It's impossible not to dance, no?” and I realize my feet are tapping, too. I give in to the rhythm and start twirling with the music. The crowd in the square breaks into small circles as people stomp, spin, and pair off for impromptu courtship dances. The pace is dizzying; no one can resist the song's contagious energy.

Tonight, the mood is celebratory, the antithesis of pizzica's seemingly tortured beginnings. Legend has it that in the distant past, musicians played these songs when someone, usually a woman, had been bitten by a tarantula spider. Contemporary pizzica, while paying homage to the customs of the past, represents a reawakening and reclaiming of the region's culture, turning something morose into a joyous event.

When the concert is over, many in the crowd continue playing tambourines, their bodies shaking and feet tapping, and we wander amid the stalls that sell CDs, instruments, jugs of local wine, and t-shirts emblazoned with big black spiders. The people around us keep dancing until we straggle back to the car at two in the morning.

I'm here in Salento in the middle of a scorching August for the Notte della Taranta, or Nights of the Tarantula, a weeklong festival that celebrates the tarantella, the famous folk music and dance of southern Italy. Concerts are slated for almost every night in different town squares throughout the region. Pizzica is the Salentine variant of tarantella, and its homeland, the southernmost part of Puglia, is still relatively untouched by tourism. It feels like the Italian countryside foreigners visited forty years ago. During the day, the villages are deserted, motionless, and oppressively hot; during the cooler evenings, the shops open, and people slink out as if from under rocks.

I've come because I'm fascinated with Salento's myth of the tarantula, in which women throughout history have claimed they'd been bitten by a tarantula, possessed, perhaps in order to escape their otherwise dreary lives. I'd seen images of these women in a dramatic film,
Pizzicata
, and heard it mentioned among my Italian friends. I wanted to understand more about this culture—and its music, which has made a decided comeback.

Since antiquity, and until only a couple of decades ago, life in Salento was desperate, particularly for women, who had little say in their destinies. Occasionally someone would sink inward, glassy-eyed, and begin writhing on the floor, delirious. Neighbors would whisper that she'd been bitten by the tarantula, and would circle around her playing instruments. The spider's poison would cause her to convulse and become manic. The afflicted
tarantata
would eventually rise up and dance in circles, stomping on the ground to the music (particularly the tambourine), as if trying to kill a spider, until the episode subsided. The ritual lasted, on and off, for up to three days, and the symptoms allegedly returned every year in June around the feast day of San Paolo (Saint Paul), who protects against venomous animals.

Today, Salento is better known for its craggy coves and Baroque architecture than for its
tarantate
, who—like the poisonous spiders that supposedly caused their frenzied state—have mostly died off. Yet on my first trip to Salento, three years ago, I noticed signs of those spiders everywhere. Faded posters of tarantulas were tacked up on village walls, advertising traditional
pizzica
music concerts. Happy-looking spiders beckoned from highway billboards, encouraging tourism in the area.

How had Salento transformed the tarantula—a grim symbol from its past—into a cheerful icon celebrating the region and its music?

To find out, I had to start with history. In the 1950s, a handful of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists started recording pizzica music. Alan Lomax, for instance—famous for discovering Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and other American roots musicians—amassed a collection of traditional Salentino folk songs. Another researcher, anthropologist Luigi Chiriatti, recorded music and oral histories in the early 1970s and has written several books on
tarantismo
.

After the concert in Alessano, I call Chiriatti, and he invites me over to his house in a town near Melpignano. His living room walls are covered with relics from his long career in anthropology: masks, ancient musical instruments, and black-and-white photos of Salento's past.

Chiriatti, a modest man in his seventies, is energetic and impassioned when talking about his region's deepest traditions, and we chat for hours about the history of the tarantula rites, how they came to Salento (probably from the Greek Dionysian cult), and the varieties of stories he has collected from tarantate over the years. What puzzles me, I tell him, is how
pizzica
, which he says by the 1980s was mostly forgotten or considered hillbilly music, is packing town squares in 2009.

“We had to revisit what identifies us as Salentini,” he says. Previously, most associations with Salento had been negative. “It had been considered a land of remorse, a land from which people emigrated because there was no work, a land with no partisan heroes—a land that had been silenced and forgotten.”

But when ethnomusicologists began rediscovering the songs and musicians began playing them, Salentini realized that
pizzica
music and dance are what makes their territory unique. Their view of the music—which is, at its heart, upbeat in sound—began to take on a positive cast, and this affected the way Salentini saw everything about their culture. “Through the music, we started seeing the territory in a truly different way, rediscovering the land, the rocks, the churches, the piazzas, and the sea,” Chiriatti says. The music fits the place.

In the 1990s, a small underground pizzica scene started to percolate, partly boosted by
Pizzicata
, a 1995 neorealist film that included interviews and sessions with traditional Salentine musicians. The film recounts the story of one tarantata, a young
contadina
(peasant woman) who was “bitten” by a tarantula and fell ill after her lover was killed and she was promised to his murderer.

Local musicians, including Bevilacqua—the photographer who was my guide in Alessano—started organizing small concerts and booking gigs throughout Europe. In 1997, some young administrators of Salento's small towns recognized the modern appeal of the spider and decided to use pizzica to promote regional identity, staging the first Notte della Taranta. The event has grown exponentially ever since, bringing tens of thousands of tourists to the area and making Salento synonymous with pizzica, the way Argentina means tango.

“By freeing the music from associations with the spider, the ritual, and religion, we've turned something negative into something profoundly positive,” Chiriatti tells me.

On the day before the final concert of the week in Melpignano, a town of about 2000 people, I find my way to the ruins of the sixteenth century Carmine church. A stage has been built there, and musicians are preparing for a dress rehearsal. Enza Pagliara sits on the grass, pressing a sweating bottle of water to her face to stay cool in the hundred-degree heat. I sit down next to her and ask about pizzica's tarantula-related origins.

Pagliara, forty-one, who has studied tarantismo and pizzica for more than twenty years, says that most people think the tarantulas were a myth. In 1959, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino set out with an interdisciplinary team of physicians and psychologists to study thirty-five women afflicted with
tarantismo
. His work was published in English as
The Land of Remorse
(and “remorse” in Italian has a double meaning: re-bitten). Today, Pagliara says, most Salentini believe that the tarantula bite was an excuse, a way for people in the villages to express rage, repressed eroticism, and frustration.

“It was a territory that was extremely poor,” Pagliara says. “People worked like serfs, and until fifty years ago, the
padrone
even had the
diritto della prima notte
,” meaning the local landowner had the right to sleep with a bride first on her wedding night. “For women”—she makes a strangling gesture around her throat—“it was untenable, and the tarantula was the way to let loose of everything, a form of therapy before psychotherapy.”

Pagliara grew up singing the songs with her aunts. She began recording, she says, because “I knew there was something precious in this music.” She went to early pizzica gatherings in the '90s and learned to dance and play the tambourine. When she began to record her relatives, at first they were ashamed and wanted to sing songs from the radio instead. “Their songs have a real sense of this territory from the older days. They're the sound of the land, and I've wanted to keep them alive.”

Pagliara performs at large concerts, but also at small pizzerias and at parties, sometimes until five in the morning. “I don't know how to sing pop or anything else,” she says. “Our oldest music was therapy for the tarantata, and so maybe I am a little crazy, because I have to sing. I need it for myself more than anything. I can't help it; I feel like I have the living soul of the music inside me, the soul of the land.”

I hear similar sentiments from other Salentini I talk to. The tradition is in their blood. Before the last show, I meet Giorgio de Giuseppe, who dances to pizzica almost nightly with small gatherings of musicians. We sit in a café outside a gas station in a small village near Otranto. De Giuseppe is a slight, fit retiree of fifty-six who worked as a jail guard. He tells me that his father, an illiterate
contadino
(peasant), was one of the rare men bitten by the tarantula, before Giorgio was born. His father never felt the bite, but became vague and depressed. Then, every year on June 29, he turned manic. The family took him to the church of Saints Peter and Paul in the village of Galatina to join the other
tarantate
in the region, who likewise became agitated on that day and went there to be calmed. For the rest of his life, even when he walked with a cane, his father had to dance whenever he heard a tambourine. Now de Giuseppe says he's inherited that urge. “A little bit of the spider's venom has been transmitted to my blood,” he says. “I don't fall to the ground and have convulsions, but I
need
to dance when I hear the tambourine.”